Perfume's GAME

Patrick St. Michel

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501325922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

Released in 2008, J-pop trio Perfume's GAME shot to the top of Japanese music charts and turned the Hiroshima trio into a household name across the country. It was also a high point for techno-pop, the genre's biggest album since the heyday of Yellow Magic Orchestra. This collection of maximalist but emotional electronic pop stands as one of the style's finest moments, with its influence still echoing from artists both in Japan and from beyond. This book examines Perfume's underdog story as a group long struggling for success, the making of GAME, and the history of techno-pop that shaped it. 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-basedbooks and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

1 The Age of Technopop

Isao Tomita went to extreme lengths to bring a Moog synthesizer into Japan. A classical composer writing music for Japanese television shows and movies since the mid-1950s, he had come to the conclusion that every sound possible via orchestration had already been done well before he came of age. Dozens upon dozens of people before him had already exhausted the potential of a classical orchestra, and Tomita had long sought a new instrument, something that could be uniquely his and fulfill his desire not to be simply redoing the past.

He found a lead when he came across Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach (1968), a collection of the German composer’s creations replicated by an American using a Moog electronic synthesizer the size of a living room table. The record had been a commercial hit and was even played at the US Pavilion at the 1970 World Expo held in Osaka (though Tomita had already encountered it by then).¹ The album showed that the synthesizer was more than a novelty but could tackle one of the West’s most celebrated artists’ music. In its interpretations of Bach, Tomita heard a tool capable of new sonic horizons.

Tracking one down, though, turned out to be a daunting challenge. Tomita could not locate a synthesizer in Japan like the one featured on the cover of Switched-On Bach, but he was directed to a distant and frozen corner of the world—Buffalo. Tomita flew out to upstate New York and found the rural town where Robert Moog was building his hulking electronic synthesizers, in a space that struck Tomita more as a shed than a factory. He would come this far, and he was ready to buy a Moog III on the spot, for a total cost that would equal many people’s annual income—around ¥10 million (roughly $125,000) in 2012 terms.²

The daunting price tag was not the end of Tomita’s tribulations, though. Owing to a near lack of electronic synthesizers in the country, Japanese custom officials were left baffled by the gigantic crate that showed up at their offices. Tomita told them it was a musical instrument. Skeptical, they told him to play it in front of them. An acoustic guitar it was not, and the Moog lacked instructions teaching anyone how to operate it. Tomita tried showing them the artwork of Switched-On Bach, but to no avail. The instrument sat around in limbo for months before Tomita received a photo from Moog itself of Keith Emerson (of the progressive rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer) manning the same synthesizer at a live show. That was the proof he needed to take his huge piece of equipment home and set the stage for the arrival of technopop in Japan.³

For decades before, Japanese people had been experimenting with machine-made music. National broadcaster Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) established the NHK Studio in 1955, and its artists, such as prolific film soundtrack maker Mayuzumi Toshirō, created some of the earliest electronic music in the nation. Many of these early recordings were more like laboratory experiments, with names such as Music for Sine-Waves by Proportion of Prime Numbers.⁴ These important developments, however, were hardly the type of music that would capture the attention of thousands upon thousands of people.

Tomita set the stage for the digital dominoes to fall. Once he assembled the intimidating Moog III and figured out how to generate sounds from it, he went to work creating his own style, initially applying the Switched-On Bach formula of recreating well-known pieces, but tackling modern pop and rock songs (the Beatles’s “Yesterday,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”) and transforming them into synthesizer-only tunes, complete with computer-generated vocals. It sounded like a novelty—all your favorite songs, gone Moog!—but it was a big step forward for the composer. It set the stage for his pivotal second album, Snowflakes Are Dancing (1974), wherein he took his electronic touch to Claude Debussy’s tone paintings. The synthesized notes revealed a new dimension to Debussy’s work, with Tomita’s versions sounding lush and alive. A smash hit, it went on to be nominated for four Grammy awards in 1975.

Matsutake Hideki picked up on the potential of what Tomita was doing. The Yokohama-born Matsutake had long been intrigued by electronic sounds—he, too, had heard new possibilities in Switched-On Bach at Expo ‘70. He served as an apprentice—via a job with a management company—to Tomita starting in 1971, allowing him to observe the composer wrangle with the Moog synthesizer and even play around with it himself when Tomita was not using it.

By the mid-1970s, Matsutake, who had branched out on his own, found himself in the company of Hosono Haruomi—a musician who had played in the influential rock band Happy End. After that band had broken up, Hosono had released several solo albums flirting with exotica, particularly as played by American composer Martin Denny, which offered a fantasy image of Asia and the South Pacific in the stereotypical sounds of pentatonic scales, parallel fourths, and wood percussion. He found himself associating with a budding musician named Sakamoto Ryūichi. Matsutake worked on both of their solo recordings. When Hosono, Sakamoto, and former Sadistic Mika Band drummer Takahashi Yukihiro decided to form YMO, originally conceived as a disco-influenced, one-off project poking fun at the Western world’s orientalist view of Asia as exemplified by Denny’s creations, Matsutake was pulled into their orbit. To many in the media, he became the “fourth member” of the unit, bringing the knowledge he acquired from working with Tomita to this new project. According to Matsutake, YMO spent much time analyzing Tomita’s work; Sakamoto, who owned all of Tomita’s records, brought them into the studio and said, “Today, let’s listen to this and study [it.].” As Matsutake told Resident Advisor, “YMO’s sound is definitely rooted in Tomita’s music.⁵

YMO made pop music ready for the dance floor, constructed primarily from electronic sounds of the day—synthesizers, video game bleeps, drum machines, and vocoders. Coupled with science-fiction themes and futuristic visuals, YMO caught attention not only in its home country but also abroad. Its single “Firecracker”—a computer-age reimagining of Denny’s exotica piece of the same name, the Tiki-Bar atmosphere of the original transformed into a plugged-in disco shuffler—became a hit in the United States. This success overseas helped the group to land advertising tie-ups with Fuji Cassette and Seiko watches, transforming its members into megastars at home.⁶

What started off as a o ne-album project turned into the most popular musical outfit in Japan for several years, launching a YMO boom. The group’s synthesizer-powered sound not only influenced Japanese artists, but reached Afrika Bambaataa in the Bronx and the Belleville Three in Detroit, influencing these pioneers of hip-hop and techno respectively. The band also performed on the American TV show Soul Train in 1980, with a playful interview with Don Cornelius. Most importantly, YMO launched a full-blown craze for technopop in Japan, turning the first half of the 1980s into a time when electronic sounds dominated both the mainstream and underground scenes. In just under a decade, electronic music went from something confounding customs workers to a nationwide phenomenon.

Defining Technopop

What exactly is technopop? The term was coined by Japanese music critic Agi Yuzuru in a 1978 review in Rock Magazine of the German group Kraftwerk’s The Man Machine. The descriptor was fitting for this album, which was built entirely out of electronic sounds; it opened with the group repeating, “We are the robots,” through vocoder.

“Isn’t the pioneer Kraftwerk?” Hosono asked in an interview from 2008, recorded backstage at a special YMO reunion show in London. “Giorgio Moroder,” Sakamoto added, “the pioneers are obviously Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder.” Takahashi closed the interview by saying with a laugh, “The two Germans, Giorgio, and we’re third.”⁷ In an interview with San Francisco Weekly in 2011, Sakamoto said, “I introduced Kraftwerk to the other members of YMO and they immediately became huge fans. But instead of imitating Kraftwerk, obviously, we wanted to invent something original—technopop from Japan. Kraftwerk was very German. We wanted to create something very Japanese.”⁸

Agi’s idea of technopop was not necessarily tied to a specific sound; Kraftwerk’s ruminations of mundane aspects of daily life over repetitive, sparse, and hypnotic music may have had little in common with Moroder’s dance-floor creations. But both artists embraced the new sounds of electronic synthesizers, along with vocoder and drum machines. The concept of the future seemed embedded in their sounds, with Moroder’s synthesized disco cut “I Feel Love” evoking a feeling of the world beyond today, or Kraftwerk’s The Man Machine, with its references to Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927), evoking a 1930s imagining of what tomorrow might look like.⁹ “Techno” simply stood for “technology.”

The emphasis on technology reflected the times. The post–Second World War boom had raised the majority of Japan’s citizens comfortably into the middle class. This wealth enabled widespread diffusion of consumer electronic products made by Japanese companies: television sets in the 1960s, JVC’s VHS and Sony’s Betamax in the 1970s, Sony’s Walkman from 1979, and successive generations of video games. As creators of consumer electronics products that were exported worldwide, Japan developed an image internationally as perpetuators of a modern, electronically driven lifestyle. Meanwhile, from the late 1970s onward, Japanese makers like Yamaha, Roland, and Casio began issuing digital synthesizers, drum machines, and other digital instruments, resulting in an increase in synthesized sounds. The Plastics, P-Model, and Hikashū all acquired and featured Roland CR-78 Rhythm Machines in their releases of the late 1970s to early 1980s.¹⁰ Technopop reflected this shift; the ever-present hum of electronic instruments mirrored the way in which electronic devices were becoming more ingrained in daily life.

YMO itself is dubbed a reimport because the attention it received overseas helped it to gain recognition in Japan, pushing technopop into the mainstream. Their second album, Solid State Survivor, was the best-selling album of 1980 and produced several Japanese classics, including “Behind the Mask,” a vocoder-drenched song about an unemotional future that was covered by Michael Jackson (1982, posthumously released). The band appeared in advertisements for Seiko Watch and FujiFilm, and Japanese electronics retailers played YMO’s music in the stores, further associating them with technology. Technopop entered the larger cultural imaginary as the monochrome costumes and stark haircuts of YMO gave way to fashion trends and techno haircuts.¹¹

Several bands of the late 1970s who also featured synthesizers were also put under the technopop category, although their philosophies were different. In contrast to the studiousness with which YMO created music with electronics, the Plastics embraced a punk-influenced DIY ethos while their bassist Sakuma Masahide, a former member of progressive rock band Yoninbayashi, introduced them to Kraftwerk. The group toured the United States, performing with the B-52s and Talking Heads. Songs like “Copy” show the group’s Devo-like balance of punk energy, electronics, and ironic lyrics, delivered by Nakanishi Toshio and Satō Chika in a clipped vocal style that could sound like malfunctioning droids. Across their celebrated 1979 album, Welcome Plastics, they sang about technologic signifiers—TVs, robots, IBM.¹²

P-Model and Hikashū, two other bands that played with synthesizers and a sense of irony, were called technopop by virtue of timing. As singer-songwriter Komuro Hitoshi said on his radio program Ongaku Yawa (Music Night Talk), “You use synthesizers and other instruments to create a cutting-edge sound. That’s totally a new style of music in vogue, the sound of this age. What you wear, the words you speak, and everything, as well as your music, all of them are created reflecting this age and the present environment.” The remarks of Makigami Kōichi, the theremin-playing leader of Hikashū, betrayed his ambivalence to the label: “I think we are just playing the music we want to play. We’re like that. But, well, ‘Technopop’ is probably the easiest thing for people to call our kind of music.”¹³

Technopop spurred new artists and existing artists to play with synthesized sounds. It ranged from the intricate synthesized explorations of Matsutake Hideki’s Logic System, to the electro-stomp of BGM, a project started by Agi Yuzuru, the writer who coined the term technopop. Takahashi and Hosono established their own sub-label, ¥en Label, under their record label Alfa Reco rds, and Hosono personally produced the eclectic Koshi Miharu and Sandii & the Sunsetz. Technopop was also integrated into mainstream postwar popular song style (kayōkyoku) as techno-kayō, where the voice-centric style was backed by electronic sounds.

One noteworthy entry was Juicy Fruits, a quartet that began as Beef, the backing band for Chikada Haruo. The band’s sound was distinguished by Okuno Atsuko’s singing, which writers described as “fluffy but monotone.¹⁴ In the group’s first and best-selling single “Jenny wa gokigen naname” (Jenny in a Bad Mood, composed by Chikada), Okuno chides her inattentive lover in a high-pitched, cute, but expressionless manner; her robot-like voice matches the twinkling keyboard notes, blending with the instrument. Juicy Fruits’s approach proved to be one of the most commercially viable takes on technopop in the early 1980s, with Okuno’s cute-but-cold persona matching images of fashionable women at the time. The song has remained in the cultural imagination and has been covered many times over the decades.

The vogue of technopop peaked in 1983, with the release of YMO’s sixth album, Uwaki na bokura (Naughty Boys). This collection still featured the electronic-age buzz of their previous work, but was unabashedly radio-friendly, with themes of love and music itself. Its lead single was “Kimi ni mune kyun” (My Heart Skips a Beat for You)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Track Listing
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Text
• Introduction
• 1 The Age of Technopop
• 2 Music Controller
• 3 A New Scent
• 4 Brave New World
• 5 Play the Game
• 6 Take Off
• 7 Love the World
• Notes
• Suggested Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright